Tuesday, August 26, 2014

My thoughts on the Neuroglyph / Mike Mearls interview (part 1)

This is the latest from EnWorld. An interview with Mike Mearls that took place during GENCON 2014. I'm going to take this in stages because I'm about to leave work...

Neuroglyph: As one of the main Lead Designers for the new edition of D&D, how did you find your experience with the whole design process, and what was it like to work on the project?Mike Mearls: I think the biggest difference… I mean obviously there’s the playtest… and I think what the biggest difference, say, between 2005 and 2011… 2012… was that when we started this game in ‘05, we had to guess, right? Gaming was changing… World of Warcraft had come out, obviously consoles like the Xbox Live and Playstation III and online multi-player had become the mainstream. And people still liked first person shooters and stuff, where people would set up a LAN party and stuff like that. And now there were services coming into to play where you could play head-to-head on the internet with other people - so gaming was definitely changing. And I think what 4th Edition, looking back, what we were trying to do was to start predicting for D&D where we thought the game was heading… so that was a big part of it. So what we think, when people are coming to role-playing games, they’re going to have that MMO background or a video game background.

So, all those people who said I was being dismissive by stating that 4e fans who dislike 5e might get their gaming fix by playing something like World of Warcraft can officially suck on it.